Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Australia has an A-grade democracy, and we should give thanks every day of our lives that we live here. But that does not mean that it is perfect, that we should be complacent and that we cannot do better. And we certainly have to safeguard it against attacks. One of the biggest flaws in our democracy—and I am not saying Australia is alone in this; far from it—is the cost of elections and the way in which political parties and candidates can become beholden to those who contribute to their campaign funds.

In Australia, the Australian Labor Party introduced election disclosure laws designed to introduce some transparency into the campaign funding process. Labor does not believe people should be able to donate money to political parties or to candidates in secret, behind closed doors. Corruption flourishes in the dark. The best antidote to it is sunlight, disclosure. These laws have not been perfect, and people have worked tirelessly to try to get around them, but what the Liberal Party is proposing to do with the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2005 is utterly shameless and utterly disgraceful. This bill seeks to emasculate and weaken the election disclosure laws. It is one of the worst pieces of legislation to come before the parliament in my 10 years here. In terms of its corrosive, cancerous impact on the quality of Australian democracy and its invitation to corrupt practices and secret commissions, it may well be the worst.

This bill reflects the government’s intent to abuse its new-found Senate majority to reshape Australia’s political system to the advantage of the Liberal and National parties at the expense of the very health and integrity of Australia’s democracy. I urge the government not to turn off the light of transparency and plunge us into the darkness of corrupt, secret backroom deals.

One of the greatest safeguards against people trying to buy political influence is the knowledge that campaign donations will be disclosed. The Howard government’s plans will change that. They will allow secret backroom deals. They will allow ministers and government MPs to hand out contracts and favourable policy decisions in exchange for campaign donations. And we will not know it is happening, because those campaign donations will be secret. This is absolutely the wrong way for Australia to go.

I believe we should be moving to strengthen the campaign disclosure laws, not white-ant them. We should be closing the loopholes, not knocking the house down. I believe we should enact measures that ensure that all fundraising bodies and trusts assisting political parties, politicians or candidates fully and promptly disclose their accounts and the source of their income.

This bill goes in the opposite direction. It will allow donations of up to $10,000 to remain anonymous, up from the present $1,500 limit by over six times. The potential for rorting increases exponentially when you consider that political parties that have national, state and territory organisations each registered separately can receive donations of up to $90,000 on the quiet. This is a shameless and brazen move by the Liberal Party to advantage itself at the expense of the integrity of Australian political life.

Liberal minister Senator Abetz has spoken about ‘a return to the good old days when people used to donate to the Liberal Party via lawyers’ trust accounts’. In February this year Louise Dodson reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, under the heading ‘Donate to us on the quiet, Libs tell business’, that the federal Liberal Party was directly asking 1,000 leading company directors for donations to the Liberal Party, making clear to them that these donations would be secret. The Liberal Party’s treasurer, John Calvert-Jones, said in the article:

The lifting of the threshold for disclosure of political donations would help the Liberals’ finances ...

Talk about giving the game away. Talk about letting the cat out of the bag. This is naked, shameless self-interest.

To make matters even worse, the Liberal Party also plans to deliver a huge tax break for campaign donors, lifting the amount that can be claimed as a tax deduction from $100 to $5,000. Why should someone get a tax break for donating to a political party? Tax deductibility for political donations should be abolished, not increased. Again it is naked, shameless self-interest—the Liberal Party putting its own political advantage ahead of the national interest and a clean, corruption-free political system.

The biggest issue in Australia in the past few months has been the ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal involving AWB. Until 2002-03 AWB made no political contributions at all. In 2002-03 it gave political parties $10,530. This rose to $74,245 in 2003-04 and to $124,145 in 2004-05. Why might a company that had managed to prosper for years without making any political donations suddenly start making donations, and indeed dramatically increase those donations in the space of just two years? We can all see that AWB greatly increased the size of its political contributions once investigators from the United Nations Volcker inquiry started to closely examine allegations that AWB had paid kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime in breach of UN sanctions. Why? It is pretty plain that AWB senior personnel had worked out that the balloon was going up and they wanted a few friends at court. People with legal training might refer to their behaviour as showing ‘consciousness of guilt’ or ‘consciousness of wrongdoing’. Were these donations intended to contribute to the health and vibrancy of democracy in Australia? I very much doubt it. AWB was essentially looking to undermine and subvert it and save itself from the consequences of its actions. The vast majority of these campaign donations went to the Liberal and National parties—$120,515 to the Liberal Party and $29,680 to the National Party. It paid $57,225 to the Labor Party and $1,500 to the Australian Democrats.

The Labor Party has not been bought by these donations. We have pursued the ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal relentlessly both inside and outside the parliament. Our national secretary, Tim Gartrell, recognising the tainted nature of these donations, has paid over all the money donated to Labor’s national office to the Australian committee for UNICEF’s Iraqi children’s appeal. But the Liberal and National parties have pocketed their AWB donations, donations that under the bill before the House could be made in secret. And has AWB got value for their donations to the Liberal and National parties? They have, in spades! This has been influence-buying at its most successful. Throughout the years of the campaign donations this government turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the chorus of warnings from home and abroad that AWB was paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein.

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